When Stanford chemistry Ph.D. Pratik Verma was accepted into StartX, Stanford University’s student-run, nonprofit startup accelerator, he had already spent two years developing a technology that would give health care providers a way to share medical records without compromising patient privacy. But he didn’t have a real company yet, he said.

StartX, and the mentorship and peer education it provided, enabled him to turn his technology into AgeTak, a company with an actual business model for solving problems in the health care industry.

“Coming out of a science background, you have no idea what you don’t know. So talking to people who have been through the process of starting companies and making products before is really invaluable,” Verma said. “I think we would have spent a long time banging our heads against walls if it wasn’t for StartX.”

Popular in the private sector, seed accelerator and incubator programs like StartX are becoming increasingly common at local universities, which recognize their potential to further their educational mission and to be a bridge between their students and the wider business community. At least four local schools have started something like an incubator or accelerator program in the past two years.

Startup accelerators provide a way for the school to better utilize the resources it already has and make them available to students in a way that fits with the warp speed pace of business when founding a startup. Accelerators bring founders together in peer groups and match them with dedicated mentors who can help steer them around the pitfalls involved in starting a company. Some also provide legal advice, small amounts of funding and office space.

Nowhere to go

“(Before StartX) there wasn’t really a community,” said StartX Senior Managing Director Cameron Teitelman, who founded the accelerator while a student at Stanford. “When I needed help with specific things, I needed to find a class that had one lecture on that topic and try to sneak into that lecture. I had to spend a lot of overhead just to learn what I needed when I needed to know it. And that’s key. You don’t have a lot of time as a startup founder.”

“To use a strange analogy,” he added, “it was sort of like Google’s idea in the early days of the Internet. There was a ton of information, but if it’s not organized, it’s useless. So that’s why we started.”

StartX’s program is very hands off and lets companies participate for free because program leaders believe that startup founders need to be self-driven and somewhat self-reliant, even if they sometimes need guidance. But each school has its own approach.

University of California, Santa Cruz’s accelerator program runs through its Center for Entrepreneurship. This program walks its companies through every aspect of incorporation and product development because UCSC tends to focus on research, which is much farther away from a commercial product and thus its participants need more help, said Dan Heller, executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurship. The center also takes between 2 percent and 30 percent equity in the companies, the proceeds of which are donated back to the school.

“The research done here happens to be a lot closer to the raw research, the original inventions as opposed to later-stage innovations. There are some major issues involved in taking that to the next step, to commercialization. You need to have a demonstrable prototype before anybody will be interested in it, but you can’t use federal research grants to do that,” Heller said. “This program forms a bridge between that pure research and a demonstrable product that could then be adopted by industry.”

Getting schooled

Carnegie Mellon University offers an accelerator program as part of its normal curriculum, as an option for students studying for a master’s degree in software management at its Silicon Valley campus. The year-long intensive program mixes traditional software classes with classes in business management and entrepreneurship, tailored to the student’s own startup idea. The idea is to teach them about different aspects of starting a company at just the point where it would normally come up in their own project. The university also offers to pay the incorporation costs for any company that comes through its program, which can run about $3,000.

Not everyone in the CMU entrepreneurship program will eventually found a successful company, said Ray Bareiss, director of educational programs for CMU Silicon Valley. But even those who don’t will benefit because the process leaves them with an ideal mix of skills to succeed in Silicon Valley.

“There’s an idea that a traditional MBA isn’t necessarily the optimal degree for the Silicon Valley. We feel that we give the best mix of technical and business skills for people who want to be in this career field,” he said.

Regardless of the way the program is structured, the benefit of an accelerator for students, schools and the Silicon Valley is clear, Verma said.

“A program like this enables a lot more students to capitalize on what they learn in their school and use it in the real world, as opposed to just getting out and working for someone else,” Verma said. “They’re going to become leaders, rather than followers.”

Stanford University — StartX
Founded: 2010
Currently enrolled: 32 founders, 13 companies
A nonprofit, student-run accelerator, StartX is unusual in that it doesn’t take any equity in the companies that take part in its program. It provides entrepreneurs in its program with mentorship, legal advice, networking, and co-working space in Palo Alto’s AOL building.

University of California, Santa Cruz — Center for Entrepreneurship (C4E)
Founded: 2011
Currently enrolled: 5 companies
The Center for Entrepreneurship runs a very hands-on program aimed at taking research happening at the university and turning it into commercially viable products. It takes between a 2 percent and 30 percent stake in the companies in its program, depending on how much assistance they need in launching. C4E focuses on companies that can be sold to existing large enterprises, and the proceeds from these sales are donated back to the university.

Carnegie Mellon University — Entrepreneur Program
Founded: 2011
Currently enrolled: 10 students
Carnegie Mellon offers what amounts to an accelerator program as an option for people studying for the Master of Science degree in Software Management at its Silicon Valley campus. The year-long, full-time program grew out of a realization that many people studying at the school wanted to work on their own ideas. It provides a mix of MBA-style business administration classes as well as technical classes tailored to helping them get their startup off the ground, helps them form connections with investors and lawyers, and offers to pay the incorporation costs of any company to come out of the program.

Santa Clara University — Global Social
Benefit Incubator
Founded: 2003
Currently enrolled: 20 students
Santa Clara University’s Global Social Benefit Incubator is unique, in that it focuses on creating companies and organizations for social good, particularly in the developing world. Most of the founders live in the developing world, and the GSBI provides them with a 10 month intensive program that connects them with MBA students, Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs. 90 percent of the companies coming out of the incubator have been funded, and 55 percent have become sustainable, profitable businesses.